Marcus Westbury, Iterative Cities – now available on youtube

Marcus Westbury recently visited Sheffield and gave a talk entitled ‘Iterative Cities: Renewal and regeneration from the bottom up’ at the University of Sheffield.

Marcus Westbury is Founder of Renew Newcastle (Australia) and Renew Australia. Over the past 5 years that program has brokered access to more than 50 once vacant spaces to more than 120 small scale creative enterprises in Newcastle, Australia.

Renew Newcastle is a low budget DIY urban renewal scheme which has led to a major transformation of the city’s fortunes. In this presentation he will argue that social, cultural and technological factors are driving a great surge in creative and economic life at the small scale and that tapping into this is a transformative force for cities and towns around the world.

Source: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=irMkalI-Oh0

Filmed on Tuesday 11th February at the Octagon Centre, University of Sheffield.

I was particularly interested by some of the key points identified in their conversation – “Hold off the “yes/no” decision about a project and a space as long as possible”, “the hack versus the rewrite“, “work at the smallest scale“…